Dawning of the day when collectors show they care?

.

And so dawns June 10^th 2010. In just a few hours will begin in Christie’s New York showrooms the sad spectacle of the antiquities auction that has been the talk of the town. If not quite a date that will go down in infamy for the United States of America, like April 10^th 2003, it is a day on which a line was crossed. In Baghdad seven years ago the US occupant showed a shocking nonchalance towards the ancient heritage of a nation they had captured by force of arms, in New York today will be shown another type of nonchalance towards the cultural property from another nation. As everybody knows, it is clear that some of the objects coming up for sale today have come from the stock of a convicted culture-thief, but it is less than clear how they got there.

Everybody in that saleroom will know that there is every likelihood that three objects in particular are of illicit provenance. Dubious at any rate. Yet the sellers insist on their “right” to continue the process of selling them. Italy after all has not produced concrete evidence that the objects were clandestinely and illegally excavated or exported (but how could they?).

Could-not-care-less buyers will be going into the auction to compete against each other to acquire them for their own personal hoard of geegaws (how could they?). They will of course do so anonymously, everybody in antiquities collecting has something to hide these days, and discretely, but they will be doing it. They will be bidding regardless. As the epitome of the no-questions-asked market they will shut out from their minds the possibility that the objects they are bidding on were the product of dirty grave-robbing, filthy thievery. After all the objects are so (“Gotta have them”) “beautiful” in themselves.

The Italian prosecutors unable to produce flashbulb nocturnal photos of Tommy Tombarello emerging from a hole in the ground clutching any one of these items watch on helpless as the American “art-market” handles these pieces. The US ICE watch on helpless as Christies’s continue the sale. They cannot even refuse the purchaser an export licence on the grounds that the object cannot be shown to have entered the US legally as the US – having no cultural property of its own – actually does not have export licences for this kind of object.

The only thing that is going to save the reputation of the antiquity collector is if June 10^th 2010 went down as the day that in the case of three of the items in today’s auction nobody placed a single bid in a demonstration that today’s collectors of antiquities want to see a new responsibility of dealers who only offer items with sqeaky-clean and verifiable legitimate proveances. “Not meeting the reserve” is not enough (that just means the sellers of the three poorly-provenanced artefacts in question valued them higher than people were willing to pay). No bids on these three items is the only thing that is going to convince the world that antiquity collectors care. Let us see if they show us today that they do.

I am not holding my breath though.

.